Final (2001)

December 7, 2001

FILM REVIEW; He May Be Institutionalized, But His Delusions Seem Real

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: December 7, 2001

Campbell Scott's ''Final,'' which opens today at the Screening Room, is not an easy movie to characterize, and it is difficult to discuss without giving away the surprise that pops up halfway through, just when you thought you had figured out what was going on. Until that point, the movie is a vaguely Pinteresque dialogue between a psychiatrist and her moody, delusional patient, interrupted by flashbacks of the patient's earlier life. But then, just as the splinters of his shattered personality begin to yield a coherent picture of who he was, the boundary between delusion and reality shifts, and the movie ventures from the familiar terrain of doctor-patient psychodrama into hazy sci-fi allegory and ethical problem play.

In spite of the nimbly edited flashbacks, a play is what ''Final'' most often feels like. Its action consists mainly of indirect cat-and-mouse exchanges between Bill (Denis Leary), who is confined to a Connecticut mental hospital, and Ann Johnson (Hope Davis), his uncertain young doctor. The dialogue, especially in the early, coyly expository scenes, sounds overly written, though gradually Mr. Leary's scattershot energy dispels the staginess.

Over the years, Mr. Leary has honed the hyper-articulate, desperate aggression of his stand-up persona into a credible acting style. Here, he is utterly believable as a smart, troubled man, and in his interactions with Ms. Davis he bounces from charm to neediness to hostile sarcasm, keeping her off-balance and keeping the movie on its toes.

His performance and Mr. Scott's smooth direction help to soften the film's pretenses. The script, by Bruce McIntosh, is at once intellectually overheated and conceptually thin; it takes itself seriously without quite figuring out what it's trying to say. But the screenplay's nerdy, earnest sensibility -- which seems informed by a diet of higher-brow science-fiction writers like Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick -- is disarmed by Mr. Leary's truculent realness.

His character imagines himself as a prisoner of a future government that has unfrozen him to harvest his organs, and Mr. Leary rebels against the neatness of the story much as Bill revolts against the impersonal bureaucracy that confines him. That both struggles are doomed does not quite doom the movie. Mr. Leary's funny, angry performance is rooted in a specific lower-middle-class New England milieu, which Mr. Scott deftly fills in with subtle sensitivity.

Ms. Davis's role is a trickier one, since she must play both Mr. Leary's foil and a professional whose moral dilemma turns out to be the film's real subject. And as ''Final'' turns its attention from patient to doctor, the schematic machinery on which their relationship is built begins to push to the surface, and you are left puzzling logical conundrums and red-herring Important Questions rather than savoring the delicacy and intelligence of the acting.

''Final,'' shot on digital video with a spare blues soundtrack, was produced by the Independent Film Channel, and in some ways it recalls ''Spring Forward,'' which the same company released last year. The resemblance lies not in plot or theme but in the modesty and integrity of the enterprise and the way both films prize the words and gestures. (They also both take place in Connecticut.) Though its story is fuzzy, the acting and direction in ''Final'' give it an air of quiet, dignified ambition.